A progressive voice from the Carolinas, featuring views, news, and dialogue that the corporate media doesn't. In the Mountains of Western North Carolina, Mills River is a rural community about 20 minutes from Asheville.

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

The Equal Rights for Zygotes Movement in Mississippi...

...is about to return that state to centuries past, and then some. It's hard for thinking people to imagine something this regressive in 2011, but it's on the ballot for referendum Tuesday. While the rights of corporate "persons" continue to exceed the rights afforded to human people, the rights of individual citizens continue to shrink. Fortunately, this is one of the truths to which people en masse are waking up.

This Tuesday, voters in Mississippi will have to decide a very strange question: should newly-fertilized zygotes have the same rights as human beings? The outcome may very well herald the future of women’s reproductive health in America. Initiative 26 would amend the state’s constitution to define a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” This so-called “personhood amendment” is part of a nationwide campaign by the radical anti-abortion group Personhod USA and its state affiliates. The measure is a transparent attempt to outlaw abortion, but it goes much further than that, criminalizing everything from common forms of birth control to in vitro fertilization — even preventing doctors from saving women’s lives. Personhood USA freely admits that these consequences are part of its far-reaching agenda to effectively eliminate any meaningful control women have over their own fertility. The effects of the personhood laws advancing in several states could touch the lives of virtually every woman in America.

Bye-bye Birth Control: Although the medical community has long been in agreement that fertilization does not mark the beginning of a pregnancy — fertilized eggs must first be implanted, and only about half of fertilized eggs actually result in a pregnancy — a startling number of lawmakers nationwide are supporting Personhood USA’s efforts to buck medical expertise and legally define life as the moment a sperm meets an egg. Mississippi’s Initiative 26 would turn common forms of birth control into the legal equivalent of homicide. That’s because contraceptives like birth control pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) not only act to prevent fertilization, but if fertilization does occur, may prevent that fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. In short, the legislation would turn the at least 13 million American women who use these forms of birth control into criminals. Also at risk of prosecution would be the millions of women whose fertilized eggs never begin dividing, never implant, or implant but spontaneously abort — assuming such events could be proven. This often happens so early on that the woman never even knows she might have been pregnant. Personhood USA has been very open about its desire to outlaw birth control. It’s a self-defeating move for an anti-abortion group, given that increasing access to birth control is the single most effective way to reduce abortions... More at Think Progress.

2 Comments:

The song, "I Got Rhythm", may be the foundation for many of the popular jazz tunes in the last century, but a seamless crossover to the antiquated "rhythm method" of birth control doesn't seem in the cards.

“In the councils of government we must guard against
the acquisition of power, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties and democratic processes.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower
from his final address to the nation
January 17, 1961

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
--Thomas Jefferson